Now that requires faith!

Then you have actual, testable evidence? Wow, better publish a paper on it, this'll change everything! Was it obtained by experiment, or by repeatable observation?

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
Illuminati's Razor-The most complicatedly evil answer is usually the most correct answer. - Fazor
"Every book is a children's book if the kid can read." - Mitch Hedberg
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

Clever. This is starting to get fun. What actual testable evidence is there for, um, say, the "big bang"?

(Sigh) You didn't read the Wikipedia article, did you? Observed universal expansion via redshift, Microvave cosmic background radiation. Concrete, analyzable data.

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
Illuminati's Razor-The most complicatedly evil answer is usually the most correct answer. - Fazor
"Every book is a children's book if the kid can read." - Mitch Hedberg
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

Ok. So the universe is expanding. I agreed to that in another quote. Creationist and evolutionis and atheists all have valid theories on the expansion of the universe and nobody argues that.

Er, no. Creationists don't have theories, they have untestable hypotheses. A hypothesis is an attempted explanation for observed data. A theory is a hypothesis that is supported by evidence. A hypothesis that can't be tested, like saying "god did it", is not part of science, which is a method of testing evidence.


Big Bang theory accounts for observed data. It says that at one time, the universe was smaller and hotter. This is proven fact, it is not in doubt. The rest of the concepts attached to it, like time beginning then and there being "nothing" before it, are not part of Big Bang theory per se, they are hypotheses that attempt to explain the Big Bang.

__________________
"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
Illuminati's Razor-The most complicatedly evil answer is usually the most correct answer. - Fazor
"Every book is a children's book if the kid can read." - Mitch Hedberg
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

From Dictionary.com --
Theory: a proposed explanation whose status is still conjectural, in contrast to well-established propositions that are regarded as reporting matters of actual fact.

hypotheses: a proposition, or set of propositions, set forth as an explanation for the occurrence of some specified group of phenomena, either asserted merely as a provisional conjecture to guide investigation (working hypothesis) or accepted as highly probable in the light of established facts.

Fact: something known to exist or to have happened.

To know something as fact and not theory as you propose, you would have to have seen it with your own eyes or have some crediable witness to the event in question. If the event is not observable, not testable, and you cannot replicate it, then is it still a fact.

To claim that all creationist have are hypotheses and no facts or theories assumes that you know all creationists and know all data that creationist talk about. Your assuming that you have infinite knowledge. There is still a lot of evidence that shows the Big Bang might have happened, but there is no proof. You cannot prove it. Just because you cannot prove it doens't mean that it didn't happen, but it does mean it that it cannot be classified as a fact.

Bolt mine

Usually I don't get involved into this type of discussion. But this is not the definition we use for a scientific theory.
In science, theories explain facts.

Moreover I do not agree with what you say about facts. Go to a high bridge with a stone in your hand. Stretch out the hand behind your back over the rim of the bridge. Open your hand so that the inside of the hand shows downwards. You will feel the stone suddenly vanish.
You were alone on that bridge, no witness. You did not see what has happened to the stone. As the stone is gone you can't repeat the experiment (maybe the mysterious thing that happened to your stone happens only to that special type of stones).

Do we agree that what has happened to the stone was: It fell. According to your definition this would not be a fact.

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Andre

"They did not know it was impossible, so they did it!"
Mark Twain

Thumping, you're showing some clear, basic misunderstandings about the nature of science, not least regarding the scientific definition of the word "theory." We do not, for example, have to actually observe something happening in order to consider it "observed"; observing effects and determining that they could not be explained any other way (and I assure you, while creationists think they have explanations for the evidence, what they have is "God did it")--or at least, that this is a very good way of explaining it that hasn't been contradicted so far. If a better explanation came along, it would supplant the Big Bang. Better explanations don't supplant "God did it" in the eyes of a creationist, because that's all they need.

However, Big Bang cosmology, contrary to certain people's belief, has nothing to do with evolution. Abiogenesis has nothing to do with evolution, really. Evolution starts after that.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

The creationist definition of "evolution" has broadened in recent years to include cosmological, astronomical, geological and chemical evolution as well as biological evolution. Basically, anything that science says that doesn't agree with Genesis.

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I think fish is nice, but then I think that rain is wet, so who am I to judge?

It's gotten to the point where careful investigation is needed just to tell parody from reality. I think that means reality is broken.- Noclevername.

Thumping, you will find a explanation for the term scientific theory in the General Science board: Evolution: Still a theory, las post on 22.01.2008.

(Sorry, I don'T know yet how to post links to other threads)

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Andre

"They did not know it was impossible, so they did it!"
Mark Twain

I think the word "faith" (like the word "belief") carries with it sufficient ambiguity that one may be justified in saying that science does involve some amount of faith/belief -- or not, depending on what one means by these terms.

I think the problem here, though, lies more specifically with the phrase "faith-based", which has been a little abused by certain political movements with antiscientific agendas, which shall remain nameless in respect of the forum's rules.

As someone else once said about another discussion a long time ago, the disagreement here is really about the subtext more than the substance.

Incidentally, welcome to the forum, Thumping.

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"All your bias are belong to us." Ara Pacis
"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire

No, we can't say that, because, scientifically, there's no definition for the word "God".

Folks, Chuck has answered the question decisively. We can pretty much close up the thread and go home.

Faith doesn't come first. Before you can act on faith, you must first learn to act. Only later in life, after you have developed the skill of reaching for apples (and many, many other skills), can you then reach for an apple on faith.

Ye ok let me have my two penneth first

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I thought I'd have a look (fully open minded) and see what this creationist science is actually saying.

(thats convenient )

You only need to read one example to conclude that this creationist science is nothing more than a manipulation of facts to suite a there own ideas. Simply an attempt to control the work that greater minds have done in understanding nature to suite there own personal belief and agenda. They manipulate fact as proof and they manipulate gaps in-between the facts as proof.They say - 'There is no reason not to believe that God created the Universe' - and that's true, but only as true as saying there's no reason to believe that 'God' did. So all it boils down to, nothing more and nothing less, is a faith- No facts, none, zero, without basis, nought, no-no facto, zilch... I don't have a problem with the idea that maybe there is something more than we see (maybe there is, maybe there isn't, who knows)... Creationists trying to twist facts and ancient stories into one will do more harm to there own cause than anything else, (as in the quote above).

You mean as we get closer to the death bed.. Your probably right, maybe we all will need faith at some stage.....
I dunno

By that point I would use the word "trust", not "faith".

You mean as we get closer to the death bed.. Your probably right, maybe we all will need faith at some stage.....

The point tried to relate back to Chuck's "We do science before we even know the meaning of the word and we can hardly have faith in something before we even know about it." A baby trying to stack blocks is not acting on faith that one block will stay on top of another. The baby does not know how to act on faith yet, for one. Its actions are better said to be a case of experimenting, discovering, or learning to stack blocks. That's not a case of faith.

By that point I would use the word "trust", not "faith".

Yeah, when you do something because that something worked in prior experiments, it is by definition a case of not acting on faith.

This kind of conversation interests me very much, it reminds me of when I was about 9 years old, I had to go to religion classes after school every Wednesday in order to receive confirmation ( ask me what it is, I still dont know )

I was always into science, so I asked a question in the religion class I said " Teacher, how come there are Dinosaur bones as evidence but there are no Jesus bones" HA think of how that sounds coming from a 9 year old kid, well anyway, instead of an answer I got in trouble, they sent me to the head nuns office and said I was being sarcastic and a smarty pants. This was not the case, I really wanted an answer, this has bothered me since I was a child. Funny how in catholic schools they did not teach the kids about Dinos or Astronomy, but in the public schools, they did. So imagine me , a confused 9 year old who would learn about history and science during the day, and then go to religion class on a wednesday for 1 1/2 hours and all I learned during the day was contradicted in my Wednesday religion class.

This is why I am still confused to this very day. Imagine If I would have brought up the Big Bang in that class, I probably would have gotten a ruler across my bum.